Abstract:

The growing sense of urgency by the public for action to address climate change stands in stark contrast to the slow pace and limited accomplishments of national and international institutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Political institutions face significant structural barriers to taking strong and rapid action to cut emissions, but private environmental governance has potential to avoid those barriers and achieve rapid emissions reductions. It appears unlikely that private governance alone can reduce emissions enough to stabilize the climate, but it does have the potential to reduce emissions sufficiently and quickly enough to buy time for enacting more comprehensive public governance measures. In this Perspective, we review what is known about private governance, present a framework for analyzing private governance initiatives, outline the prospects of the framework for understanding and guiding private governance, and identify future research priorities for applying this framework.